Your time habits don’t just
affect you, they affect those around you too.
Perhaps you’re not aware of the impact you make, whether in a positive or negative way.
When you have poor time habits, for instance an inability to plan or manage your priorities, it can have a significant impact on your colleagues
as well.
- You drop urgent work on a colleague’s desk that needs doing NOW!
- Sending emails late at night or over the weekend and expect a response.
When you give someone a piece of urgent work, it has an impact on their workload. And if they’re already busy, it adds
pressure.
By placing unrealistic demands to get work done or having unrealistic demands made on you, it impacts productivity and increases stress.
They may be reluctant to push back or say no, so you might think they're ok with it.
But the reality is they feel overwhelmed and demotivated.
Now they have to work late to get your work finished and the other things they were already working on.
You feel what
you’re doing is more important than everything else and your work is a priority but is it?
“Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”
It works the other way too. If you’re in the habit of accepting work regardless of the
impact.
- Say "yes" to work without understanding what you're taking on and you'll end up feeling frustrated and resentful.
- If you're in the habit of saying "yes" because you feel guilty or unable to say "no", you'll get more work and feel more overloaded.
- Accept other’s poor time habits and poor time management and nothing changes.
Decide what is acceptable. What do you need to work better and more efficiently?
Change your time habits
If you can't change someone else’s time habits, change yours.
- Create good boundaries, so you’re in a better position to know what you can and can’t accept.
- Say "no", more often and understand the impact on your time and priorities.
- Provide timely feedback, so colleagues, direct reports and your line manager understand what you need.
- When an urgent request is going to delay the completion of another task or stop you leaving work on time, say so!
- For instance, when they drop a load of work on your desk with no
priority, no order, no timeframe, tell them.
Tell them what you need and what they can do to help you to help them.
Be part of the solution
Sometimes I feel I’m working
with the wrong person.
They’re reacting to the poor time habits of someone else, either their boss or their colleagues.
- An employee struggling with unrealistic demands needs effective delegation and better communication.
- Directors implementing new business objectives with limited resources and staff. A "can-do, just get it done" attitude can go so far but not without consequences. Mistakes get made, quality drops, deadlines are missed, stress increases and motivation decreases.
While I can help to improve their own productivity and put in place systems to help them organise their priorities and manage their
workload, that's only part of the solution.
They need their good time habits to rub off on others. And it does happen.
Being able to model good time habits can have a positive impact on the habits and behaviours of their colleagues, direct reports and line
manager.
When you respect and value your time and others will start to respect and value it too.
